asdf VS fnm

Or if you need to manage more than just node, asdf has been around for over a decade and works great. You can use a .tool-versions to change runtimes for each project you have, in addition to managing your global runtime versions

https://asdf-vm.com/

Why not just use a tool like asdf (https://asdf-vm.com/) or mise (https://mise.jdx.dev/)?

These tools have the advantage of not being multi-taskers and can manage version for all your tools. You wouldn’t need pyenv and npm and rvm and…

We’ve even started committing the .mise.toml files for projects to our repos. That way, since we work on multiple projects that may need multiple versions of the same tool, it’s handled and documented.

The purpose of a version manager is to help you navigate or install any tools for development easily. Version Manager can be one tool for each dependency (e.g. NVM, g) or One tool for all dependencies (e.g. asdf, mise).

(asdf)[https://asdf-vm.com/] fully supports Python and almost any other language. I've been using it for Ruby, Python, Elixir, and other languages for years and never looked back.

Secondly, our development environments must not drift, because then code may behave differently and a change could pass on our machine but fail in production. There are many tools for locking down environments, e.g nix, pkgx, asdf, containers, etc., and they all share the common goal of being able to lock down dependencies for an environment accurately and deterministically. And that needs to be enforced in our local workflow so we don't have to rely on CI environments for correctness. All developers must have environments that are effectively identical to what runs in CI (which itself should be representative of the production environment).

There are many ways this can be done (e.g nix, pkgx, asdf, containers, etc.), and we won’t get into which specific tools to use, because we'll instead cover the essential essence of preventing environment drift:

I've really been enjoying asdf, which is a program that allows you to install specified versions of dev utilities as well as dynamically manage them via shims and .tool-versions files.

I use the asdf version manager.

You might check out rtx[1]

Its an asdf[2] rewrite, in rust, that can do most of the things nvm can

[1] https://github.com/jdx/rtx

[2] https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf

Install nodejs: (I highly recommend using a node version manager like fnm) and to install a recent node version (current long term support is 16+)

I highly recommend setting up nodejs with a version manager, nvm was and still is a popular option, however, I now recommend and have been using fnm, a simpler and faster alternative to manage my nodejs versions.

I switched from nvm to fnm a few years ago and have never looked back. Zero performance issues and it supports .nvmrc files.

https://github.com/Schniz/fnm

Are you using some kind of node version manager like fnm?

If it's your terminal that's slow in general and not neovim specifically I found that switching from nvm to fnm for managing node significantly faster at starting up my shell. I don't know whether this is what your issue is but I thought I'd share it regardless. https://github.com/Schniz/fnm

fnm is a fast and simple Node.js version manager. It's really easy to use and is much faster than nvm.

As a macOS user, it boils my brain whenever I've to type in something like ~/Library/Application Support/org.rust-lang.Cargo/config.toml. macOS users have been begging CLI tools to support XDG variables on macOS too. Setting defaults is a strong indication to the community what should be the "preferred" locations. The defaults defined in your article will invariably lead to some authors saying that if that path is good enough for cargo, then it is good enough for their tool. Even the latest draft RFC acknowledges that macOS should use XDG variables too. I've written more about this here.

Install something like Fast Node Manager from https://github.com/Schniz/fnm and install your Node from there. I work in the software field and tend to use the LTS releases for the TypeScript/React projects I work on.

fnm!

You’ll need pnpm and Node.js installed on your machine + some tool for switching node versions (e.g. fnm or nvm will work fine);